Alongside rote one-dimensional characters and an overly familiar critique of wealthy liberals, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom features plenty of clunky indie rock references, including mentions of Ben Gibbard and Jack White and an analysis of a Bright Eyes show. (There’s also Wilco, Michael Stipe, etc.) After finishing it a few months ago, I started Jennifer Egan’s (now Pulitzer Prize winning) A Visit From The Goon Squad, which talks about “jock hardcore” bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks, not bands you’d reference as “indie rock,” but it reminded me that Bad Brains (and Ian MacKaye) appear in Freedom as symbols of prime D.C. exports. (Tellingly, no mention of Rollins. Or his spoken word.) Jumping between these two books in less than a week, I decided to put together a short list of some “indie rock” (or whatever) references in more recent works of fiction. Some are just rock references, I guess. And when I say “recent,” I opted to include Bret Eaton Ellis’s Imperial Bedrooms instead of American Psycho, etc. It’s just a starting point, really, so don’t read it as a “Top 10″ … it’s just 10 (or so), a brief spewing that should be built upon, especially as the weather gets warmer and “Summer Reading” becomes something people start considering. In that vein, even though I’m personally revisiting William Gaddis, it might be interesting to have a music-related list of novels and short story and poetry collections and black metal zines for folks to take to the beach. Start it with the previously mentioned Freedom and A Visit From The Goon Squad and add, via a caffeinated morning:

He puts on a t-shirt. He takes off the t-shirt. He puts on a collared shirt. Robert looks at a glass of water. He drinks from the glass of water. The album Strawberry Jam by Animal Collective is playing. Robert checks his email. Robert has no new email. Robert looks at his cat. He thinks “Animal Collective are probably happy.”

Trinie Dalton’s older Wide Eyed opens with a epigram from Pavement’s “Range Life” and goes onto to reference the Flaming Lips, Lou Reed, the Stones, etc. (I focused on all of that in a Village Voice review a few years ago.)

Dennis Cooper, aka the guy I did my graduate work on, published that book as part of his Akashic Little House On The Bowery series. From the Guided By Voices riffs in Guide to Joy Division in his first novel Closer to his association with Deerhunter and onward, he sorta gets his own separate list. (Speaking of which, another book published via Cooper’s imprint, Mark Gluth’s The Late Work Of Margaret Kroftis uses Spencer Krug for one of its epigraphs, makes allusions to Robert Pollard.)

Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms is named after the 1982 Elvis Costello album (and there’s a “Beyond Belief” epigraph among other Costello-isms) and references the National (“one time you were blowing young ruffians … sung over the digital billboard on Sunset advertising the new Pixar movie”), Bruce Springsteen (“So leave everything you know and carry only what you fear…” on repeat), Bat For Lashes (“What’s A Girl To Do?”), among others, etc. It’s also a weirdly disliked/underrated book, one that maybe doesn’t stand up to Lunar Park or American Psycho, but that deserves a reevaluation.

Richard Yates by Tao Linn alludes to Jets To Brazil, among others … like Hot Water Music. That, and for a bunch of folks, Linn is to literature what chillwave is to music, so feel free to mention at cocktail parties/BBQs.

Justin Taylor offers two cents on his own books, the short story collection Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever and the novel The Gospel Of Anarchy:

…Mostly my story collection- there’s Pixies, Animal Collective, Silver Jews, Will Oldham, Hüsker Dü …. I wrote a Largehearted Boy piece about it when the book was new. The piece goes through story by story, with bands and individual songs identified, and the logic behind each choice … The novel is set in a punkrock house in Gainesville, Florida in 1999 and so the bands name-checked in it are more “diy punk” than properly “indie,” but This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb gets a mention, and in one chapter a character geeks out for a couple pages over Dead Moon’s “Strange Pray Tell.”

My friend Andrew Leland mentions a Silver Jews reference in Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men. Camden Joy wrote The Last Rock Star Book: Or, Liz Phair, A Rant, etc. (He was also deeply into Camper Van Beethoven.)

Another friend, Mark Sussman, mentions: “Joe Pernice wrote his Meat is Murder 33 1/3 as an autobiographical novel, though that’s probably not the kind of thing you’re talking about.” Maybe. (Which means John Darnielle’s Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality is also a maybe…) He also noted: “David Foster Wallace called Flaming Lips’ Transmissions From The Satellite Heart ‘my generation’s Sgt. Pepper’s,’ but he did it in an interview.”

And, as I’ve said in the past, Destroyer’s “Bay Of Pigs” constantly reminds me of The Savage Detectives, though doesn’t mention it explicitly. Any other cases like this? Does Nick Hornby get his own list? Douglas Coupland? People writing about Pavement? Don DeLillo on Wolf Eyes? (Just kidding.) (Though why not his Dylan riffs in Great Jones Street…)

I just finished Joe Hill’s “Heart Shaped Box” which features an aging rocker, but I could swear it references one or two indie bands at some point. I’m not 100% certain, but thought I’d throw that out there.

tao lin’s iiiiiiiiiii is probably the worst book i’ve read in my life and i’m assuming the rest of the suggested artists are taking the same look-my-book-has-your-fav-band-mentioned-in-it-but-it’s-crap path!a peace of advice for so called writers-a pop reference does not make a book!a dead elijah wood is funny as an idea on twitter. full stop.

You’ll get it then: It’s the muted post horn/Tristero symbol. On my left arm next to an old woodcut, my wife’s name, and beneath a big ol’ whippoorwill. (The book nerdery continues: I have a William H. Gass symbol on the right arm surrounded by a bunch of other stuff.)

Perverted By Language: Fiction Inspired by THE FALL, also edited by Peter Wild, is as great as the Sonic Youth “companion” is disappointing. Just as pure reading, no judgement of the bands’ relative musical merits (I love them both). Weird how that turned out.

Most Viewed

The Doors are part of a very specific category of classic-rock artists: the gateway artists. The bands that — assuming you weren’t around in the ’60s — are amongst the first names you explore when you start digging into pop music’s past. Though keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore were all… More »

Last night, U2 played the seventh night of an eight-night stand at Madison Square Garden. (Our own young classic rocker Ryan Leas reviewed one of those shows earlier in the week.) And at last night’s show, the band introduced a few special local guests. There was New York royalty Paul Simon, who came out to… More »

After reportedly showing up half an hour late, rapper Travi$ Scott got his Lollapalooza set shut down after only 5 minutes by encouraging fans to jump the security barrier and rush the stage. Festival organizers deemed the resulting chaos to be unsafe and shut the whole thing down, with security forcibly removing Scott from the… More »

Morrissey often uses his True To You website to write about cases of what he considers to be societal injustice, as he did in the recent post blasting the killer of Cecil the lion. But as Pitchfork points out, Morrissey’s latest post for the site details a much more personal violation. Morrissey writes that, a… More »

Eminem is a pretty fit dude — for a while, he was even attached to star in Antoine Fuqua’s new boxing movie Southpaw. So how does Eminem stay a pretty fit dude? By working out compulsively. And in a new article on Men’s Journal, the rapper details his compulsive exercise regimen. “In the early days,”… More »

Superproducer Mark Ronson stopped by for a live in-studio session at Australian radio station Triple J today. As usual, he assembled a crack team of musicians to back him up, including Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Kirin J. Callinan on guitar. The band performed a great psyched-out cover of Queens Of The Stone Age’s “I… More »

Lollapalooza takes place this weekend in Chicago, and most of the sets from the festival will be livestreaming via Red Bull TV in case you can’t (or don’t want to) leave the comfort of your own home. Some of the acts performing this weekend include Paul McCartney (with a highlights-only set streaming), Metallica, the Weeknd,… More »

Drake has already released not one but two diss tracks in response to Meek Mill’s ghostwriting allegations. After Funkmaster Flex promised a Meek response track Monday night on Hot 97 and failed to deliver, people were pissed, and everyone began to wonder if this mega-beef were already over. But no — the soap opera continues! More »